Opening Day

Saturday was a beautiful, bright, melting day. Sunday was a sleety, slushy, flooding day. As a result, central Maine is a big mess. At the moment our driveway is impassable except for four-wheel drive vehicles. That means my car isn't going anywhere for the foreseeable future. The frozen gravel roads are collapsing into quagmires. My friend Linda, who remembers when her road returned to swamp in the early 1960s, described its present state as "so interesting." Her husband Ralph, who is automotively fearless, shook his head and said, "Don't know how we'll get that car out but we'll try," which is as pessimistic a driving statement as I've ever heard from him.

Hard as it is to imagine that anyone could be playing baseball in such weather, today is opening day for the Red Sox, and it's a good thing they're playing in Baltimore rather than New England. So this afternoon, while gunning Tom's pickup through the icy scummy muddy slushy moat formerly known as our driveway, I'll also have the radio tuned to the slow and dreamy commentary of summer.

Here's a poem from my western Pennsylvania project, a small vision of baseball and tragedy, dedicated to the first day of my favorite season.


October

            1946

Dawn Potter

As a kid he lived on cabbage I bet

they is still talking about that funny stance

the sparks from the zinc plant that lit up

like fireworks on the Fourth of July nothing

grew in Weed Field it was those plumes of smoke

from American Steel you breathed that air

all the time it was dirty after his hard slides the fans

threw fruit at his head I didn’t like being dead that much

When I tagged that humpty-dumpty bum-armed pitcher

for a home run we was two happy proud Polacks that night

but why was he delivering kielbasa and cheese

if he’d signed with the Cardinals oh they played

the World Series in the daylight back then

and we listened on the radio when he shagged

that can of corn for the second out just one more out

and then car horns was honking men tossing hats

                                                

Teddy Ballgame laid his face in his two hands

and cried but in the morning it was all over we was

back to business as usual and in the papers we learnt

how Göring died poisoned himself thought he was

too good to swing with the rest.

[from Chestnut Ridge, a verse-history-in-progress of southwestern Pennsylvania]